Posts Tagged ‘Travels’

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My Beautiful Bride and I visited the Great Falls of the Potomac several years ago, and, of course, I took lots of pictures. Recently, when looking through them, I used Photoshop to make one of the photos look like a charcoal sketch. I rather like the result, so I’m sharing it with you.

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Back in 2002 (how time flies!) I spent a week in Dublin, Ireland, working on a software project. One evening an Irish colleague gave me a quick tour of downtown Dublin, which is where I took a photo of the street we were walking along.

Looking at the photo recently something about it — possibly the sky — made me think it would make a beautiful black and white photo. So I used Photoshop to convert the original into this image.

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Little River Falls near Fort Payne, Alabama, is a place My Beautiful Bride and I have visited several times. I got a photo of the falls several years ago when Betsy took me there for my birthday. Although I thought the photo was nice, I also felt it needed something ‘extra’. So I used my computer to turn the photo into this line drawing. Isn’t software wonderful?

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This image is based on a slide of a photo I took more than thirty years ago. When I took the photo I was on my way to visit the Great Wall for the first time, and I got this photo of my first glimpse of the wall — ruins on the first peak in the photo. Since the slide had badly deteriorated over time, I used Photoshop to clean the image and added a ‘dreamy’ look. This is the result.

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While on our western trip earlier this year (September), Betsy and I traveled from Red Lodge, Montana, to Yellowstone along the Chief Joseph Scenic Byway. The day was beautiful and the scenery was spectacular. This panorama shows part of the view from Dead Indian Pass on the byway.

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Back in the day I used to shoot with slide film, and I still have several trays of slides stashed away in my work area. I’m trying to get them scanned, but it is slow going.

Some of the slides are so old that they have deteriorated over the years, but I have found that if I play around with the scanned image in Photoshop I can sometimes get a usable image. The image above is from a slide taken in 1987 during my first visit to Hong Kong. We had been on a boat tour of the Aberdeen section of the city and we passed this ornate floating restaurant. Our guide said the food was very delicious, but I never had the opportunity to eat there. I do enjoy the photo, however.

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Biltmore House and Gardens is one of the favorite places My Beautiful Bride and I visit several times a year. We rarely tour the house, but we almost always visit the Conservatory and the Walled Garden. Both are beautiful any time of the year, and we never tire of visiting there.

I created the image above by playing in Photoshop with a photo of the Walled Garden taken several years ago. I tried to create an image that looked similar to a charcoal sketch or some other type of drawing while being at least somewhat realistic.

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I visited Bali almost thirty years ago and found the island to be both beautiful and idyllic. One of the sights I really enjoyed was all the terraces we saw as we toured the back roads of the island.

At that time I was taking photographs with slide film, and although the slides have degraded over the years, they still bring back wonderful memories. This image is made from a scanned slide that was ‘tweaked’ in Photoshop to hide some of the damage.

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Betsy and I visited King’s Bluff Falls in February, 2013, on our visit to Arkansas. The hike to the falls was pleasant, and, thanks to a zoom lens, I was able to get a close-up view of water going over the brink of the falls. I tweaked the image in Photoshop to make it look more like a modern art painting.